Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1887-11-25
'SCONSET BY THE SEA.
PRENTICE MILFORD ON A PHASE OF
WATERING PLACE LIFE.

Summer Camps Along the Atlantic Sea-
shore-Quiet Charm of Nantucket-Life
in the Cottage-Quiet and Unpreten-
tious Enjoyment-Hotel Life.
There is a great change going on as re-
CARDS the manner of life at the watering
places ON the Atlantic seaboard. 1t COM
menced some fifteen or twenty years ago,
when the seaside camp meeting system
begun and the Methodists and Baptists
first caught the idea that they could COM
bine religion, health, a wrestle with the
ocean and a protracted meeting at one and
the same time That led to the estab
lishment of the great UNCONVENTIONAL and
religious summer camps at Ocean Grove
and Asbury Park, just below Long
Branch on the Jersey coast, Cottage City
on Martha's Vineyard, where one-third of
the Rev. De Witt Talmage's congregation
have recently been ruSticating and SWIM
ming, and several other smaller camps.
The Spiritualists also tumbled to this
fact, and are now every summer located
thousands strong at Onset bay on the
Massachusetts, coast and Lake Pleasant in
the interior of that state, where they live
in tents or cheap cottages and receive
communications of all sorts through their
mediums from the higher and lower
heavens. In fact, this summer seaside
camping is extending and gradually fill
ing up every convenient point on the At
lantic coast from Maine to Maryland.
ALONG THE SHORE.
Twenty-Five years ago the south shore
of Long Island was little occupied in this
way Today there is almost continuous
!! string of summer cottages, hotels and
club houses from Brooklyn to the COM
mencement of the peninsula of Montauk.
The sporting clubs especially are apt to
| take large slices Of land, and as in cases
they have bought it cheap, theirs is likely
| to prove a good investment. Besides, it
| is becoming more and more ''the thing'
| for every city man who makes any pre-
| tension to style to have his summer cot
| tage somewhere, though it be no more
| than a tent with a board floor or house
wooden as to frame and covered with cot
ton drilling like those we used to run up
| in. the mines, and in which we added to
| the commercial prosperity of the state of
| California by drinking corn whisky and
| piling the empty bottles in cords without
| the door.
A yearly increasing number of people
| have come to discard the hotel and take
| to the cheaper and more informal cottage.
| They hire them for the season, furnished.
| The business of building and letting fur
| nished seaside cottages is increasing. The
! system is also SuperSeding the summer
| hotel. People live far cheaper and, for
| that matter, far more informally and
| consequently easier at their cottages than
| at the hotels. They do not need to dress
| for dinner or other occasions two or three
| times a day. They bring with them their
| own help, buy their own provisions, cook
I their own meals, invite what friends they
| may without much additional expense
| disrobe for their ocean baths at their
| homes, walk down to the beach in their
| bathing suits and walk back again drip
| ping wet. This kind of life brings people
| nearer together and rubs off q good deal
| of unnecessary stiffness. The people who
| so live are by no means always those of
| limited means. In Underhills system of
| relatively cheap furnished cottages here
at Siasconset, he has among his tenants
| even New York millionaires, who take re-
| spectiyely for the summer little one
I stored, many chambered houses, which
cost him, furnished, from 5000 to 81 200
! apiece. They are neatly and tastefully
4 SuppllCd VIII DSNlS, dill utC6oodly ldUle anu
| cooking furniture, conveniences for wash
| ing in fact, with everything needed for a
| housekeeping family to pepper box, and
rent from 500 is 5000 for the season.
| THE COTTAGE SYSTEM.
This cottage system is quiet and UMPIRE
tentious. it does not take up much space
in the fashionable seaside news column of
the daily paper. Peter Smith, the hun
dred millionaire, and his family have ten
times more space, ink and type given him
than have 100 of the cheap cottage resi-
dents. But the mass so living in the sum-
mer by the sea is increasing, and it in
wolves the best intelligence and sound
common sense of the land, who do not
come into the country to repeat the form
atty Of the city, and who can exist with
out sitting daily at an expensive hotel
table, on which must be all possible kinds
of meat, fish and game for which earth,
air and water have been ransacked; where
one half the food, despite the style in
| which it is served, has lost it's freshness
from overmuch refrigeration or absorption
| of the conglomerate odors and f1avors
amid which it is cooked in the great hotel
| kitchen-meals served with all the form
ality of high mass, and where you are
| tyrannized by an attendant demon of a
French or colored waiter, who 'sizes up''
your style in thirty seconds, and is atten-
tive in proportion to the fee you occa-
sionally slip into his PALM while you are
paying the landlord 81 day exclusive of
extras, and an extra charge for an orange
threatened if you want to eat it in your
room when you have an appetite for it.
Of course, there are people who like this
style Of living and they should be graft
fed, and 1 am glad they are gratified, for
I do love to see my fellow creatures, male,
female or otherwise, enjoying life in their
own way and as nature had formed them
to enjoy life Moles best love existence
under ground, rats in sewers, mosquitoes
in swamps, and some people require more
style than they do good bread and butter,
and breathe in certain sustenance aud
satisfaction in Irving up to the dress
parade and formality of the fashionable
watering place hotel, just as peacock is
made to feel happier and better by spread
ing his magnificent tail feathers or in see.
ing its brother peacocks spread theirs
around it. This is varied world and
varied human and inhuman nature all
about us, and everything and everybody
| have their DlaceS and uSeS-Prentice MTl.